James Tate’s ‘Dome of the Hidden Pavilion’ – The New York Times

James Tate (1943 – 2015) was an American poet. his first book, “The Lost Pilot” (1967), for publication in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. “The Lost Pilot” deals with an event that Tate turned into a foundational myth: When he was 4 months old, his father crashed while flying a mission over Germany. The two never met; instead Tate wrote, in the title poem, imagining his father as a pilot orbiting the earth year after year:

This is a new book is called Dome of the Hidden Pavilion. From the NYT review: “A shocking number of the poems here are about war and battle. There’s “The Lost Army,” “The Mission,” “The Invasion,” “Explosive Device,” “The Battlefield,” “After the War,” “The Soldiers’ Rebellion” and more. In “Life’s Game,” a couple are sneaking around town when they hear gunshots. The narrator real­izes they are in a video game he has been playing: “ ‘Watch this,’ I said. I waved my hand above me and shots were fired. I stood / up and a bullet hit me right between the eyes. ‘I’m dead,’ I said. ‘Oh my God, you’re right,’ she said.” One of the more potent war ­poems, “The Psychiatric Unit,” deals with memories you can’t let go of: “I remembered the ashen faces of the children with their / one good arms reaching out to touch their dead mothers and fathers / curled up at their feet.” When the speaker returns to America, “they stuck me in / a psychiatric unit with hundreds of other soldiers”:”